Listening Project

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to encourage students to explore a variety of listening sources, create a database of reviews, and/or have students reflect metacognitively on their listening skills.

Image source: https://www.nytimes.com/guides/smarterliving/be-a-better-listener

Feel free to scroll to the bottom to get right to downloading this resource available in English or English/French.

There are plenty of reasons why giving students free choice in their reading is best for having them (gasp) actually enjoy reading! There are also some great ideas out there for building up reading programs that make students love reading again (my interview with Agent Kari Pitstick about reaching reluctant readers was very inspiring in this regard!) However, it got me thinking… we do a lot to encourage students to explore written resources for pleasure, why aren’t we doing the same for listening resources?

When looking at the learning outcomes for my second language courses, I found that students should be able to ‘independently locate, explore and think critically about a wide variety of texts’ and ‘recognize different purposes, degrees of formality, and cultural points of view in these texts’.  Often, we view ‘texts’ as being only written, but they can be listened to as well!  Therefore, this project is designed to encourage students to explore and evaluate a variety of listening resources.  Additionally, it is designed to dovetail with the research component of their Genius Hour projects. However, if you aren’t doing a Genius Hour project, I also have a version where they explore a topic of interest to them (i.e., sports, celebrities, fairy tales, cars, video games, etc.) 

After listening to Kari, I have to admit I’m a convert for not making students do a lot of onerous work around what they are reading (or in this case, listening to). HOWEVER, this project is designed more around metacognition and sharing, rather than deep analysis of the actual text.

Part one of the assignment is a Listening Resource Portfolio that can be shared with other classes.  The idea is that, as a department or group of classes, you can build up a list of resources on a variety of subjects with which students can use to practice their listening skills.  So, if you are doing some free listening practice and students say “but I don’t know what I want to listen to” you can point them to the resource collection, and they can browse for a topic or type of resource that interests them. This would be perfect for building up a giant google slide deck or other similar online resource that students could access at home!

I’ve created a chart of possibilities for students to choose from for exploring resources to encourage them to go outside of their confort zones (below - English on the right, French on the left). In the project I have students choose from these categories, and I also think it’s a great way to demonstrate the global nature of language!

If all you’re looking to do is get students to gather resources to share, then you can stop here! The evaluation for part one is pass/fail: did the student fulfill the criteria or not?

Part two of the assignment is a Personal Reflection, which I tell my students will not be shared. It is designed so that students can demonstrate their ability to reflect metacognitively (thinking about their thinking) about their listening experiences. There is a part for reflecting on the content itself (in a general way) and a part for reflecting on their listening skills. Because I speak the same L1 as my students, I have them do this part in our shared language of English because I want to emphasize that it’s about the thinking that they are expressing, not about language proficiency. However, I understand that not everyone follows this line of thinking, or shares the same languages as their students.

I think it’s important to note that being a good listener is not an innate skill. Like anything else, it needs to be explained and practiced. I like to use the six strategies of inferencing, elaboration, self-monitoring, summarization, self-evaluation, and toleration of uncertainty. You can download a handout developed by pbworks based on research by Young (1997) here that I like to use.

RESOURCE: Listening Project (in English with English examples, can be adapted to other languages, stands alone as a project)

RESOURCE: Listening Project (in English with English examples, can be adapted to other languages, has a connection to a genius hour project)

RESOURCE: Listening Project (instructions in English for French students, examples in French, stands alone as a project)

RESOURCE: Listening Project (instructions in English for French students, examples in French, has a connection to a genius hour project)

RESOURCE: Listening Project Evaluation (in English/French)

RESOURCE: Listening Project Evaluation (English only)

How do you engage students in listening? Feel free to share in the comments!

PART II: GENIUS HOUR 3-steps to success!

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to engage students in their L2 throughout the year by doing genius hour projects.

This is Part II of my two-part entry on using Genius Hour Projects! Part I can be found here, which explains why I love these projects so much!

Note: I exclusively did these projects with my senior students as a way to showcase their five years of language learning. This was because French 12 was an elective, so students had chosen to be there, students were capable of doing self-directed work, and their language ability was such that this was possible. However, I do think there’s a way to adapt this for lower-level language classes, if you’re willing to try.

Step One: Introduce the project to students

This was done in the first couple of weeks of class. I had a powerpoint where I would start with a turn-and-talk about the idea of ‘genius’ and how it’s all in the eye of the beholder, and include one of the most well-known teacher cartoons of all time:

Tout le monde est un génie. Mais si vous jugez un poisson sur sa capacité à grimper à un arbre, il passera sa vie à croire qu’il est stupide – A. Einstein

We would then watch a video explaining genius hour, and some other YouTube inspirational stuff. Sometimes I would do some creativity exercises (I’ll post some soon). Then, I would explain the project and have students start to brainstorm what they’d like to do. I’d explain to students that this was in lieu of a final exam, and a chance to showcase everything they’d learned in French.

Students would submit an ‘application’ for approval of what their project would be. Once approved, they would write their inquiry question on a piece of paper which we affixed to a bulletin board on one of my walls. Since I had multiple classes, it was cool for them to see what other people were working on! I could also put up any updates or messages about the genius hour projects on that board.

RESOURCE: Project hand-out/application: Genius Hour Proposal

Step Two: Work on it throughout the semester/year

This was the hard part, as I always felt like I had too much curriculum to cover, and not enough time. However, the more time I gave for students to work on the project in class, the better their projects would be. Moreover, the more time I had to check-in with students and see how they were doing, guide their project, and do small, informal conferences, the easier it was for me to mark the projects! Giving students a heads-up was invaluable, as many of them had a lot of material they wanted to bring in to work with (I loved seeing students, for example, pull out a block of wood and start carving!)

There was a lot of ways to incorporate current lessons, such as starting the class with a chance for students to chat about their project’s progression using, for example, four adjectives or in the past tense. Mostly, though, I just enjoyed seeing them do their thing!

Some students used blogs, which was a great way to keep an eye on what they were doing if I didn’t have time to check-in during class

This was also FANTASTIC if I knew I was going to be away for a meeting. I’d tell students that they’d be working on their genius hour projects on X day, and then my substitute plan was just an explanation of the project and directions to supervise so I didn’t need to worry if my replacement spoke French or not.

I would also do goal-setting and check-in dates to keep students on track.

RESOURCE: goal-setting form: Genius Hour Goal Setting

RESOURCE: check-in form (mid-way through project): Genius Hour Check-In

Step Three: Presentation time!

At the end of the semester I was lucky in that we ended up doing these HUGE half-day classes (2.5 hours) in the last week so everyone could present. Before that, I would do 3 rounds of 20 minutes in an 80-minute class. So students would be at “stations” (usually 5-6 at a time) and the other students would wander around to check it out and ask questions (see below). Then, they would ‘switch’ and new stations would be set up, so the focus was only on 5-6 students at a time, usually talking to 3-4 students at a time.

RESOURCE: Questions prompts for students to use in a variety of tenses: L’heure de génie questions

A few times I invited other classes to come check out the projects. This was great if I could get grade 11 students since a) it was good advertisement for taking French 12, an elective, which meant I got to keep my job and b) it allowed the students to present to an audience that hadn’t seen the progression of their project. I also invited the administration (as a new teacher, great to showcase cool things you’re doing) who were allowed to ask questions in English or French. My favorite, of course, was when students would bring their pets or bake yummy things to share!

Student presenting to peers; me spying and taking pictures

During this time I would go around eaves-dropping and interacting with students so that I could give them a speaking mark based on their fluidity and vocabulary use. I found that I had enough time to get a good sense of students’ abilities during the time we had, though another option would have been a 1-on-1 scheduled appointment for an oral interview. I run a pretty interactive class to begin with, so I had also heard students speak daily for the entire semester.

Then, I would do a mad scramble for evaluating the written part before submitting my marks. I also had students do self-evaluations. Depending on the students I would have certain criteria (demonstrate certain tenses, use vocabulary from our musique mercredi weekly assignments, etc.) Because I wanted in-depth feedback, students had the option of doing their self evaluation in English or in French.

RESOURCE: Genius hour evaluation: Genius Hour Rubric

RESOURCE: Genius hour self-evaluation: Genius Hour Self-Eval

PART I: GENIUS HOUR Why I love genius hour projects

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to engage students in their L2 throughout the year by doing genius hour projects.

This is Part I of my two-part entry on using Genius Hour Projects! Part II can be found here, which explains my three-step process for doing these projects, along with all my rubrics and hand-outs.

What’s a genius hour project you ask? Well, this video does a pretty great job explaining it. Basically, it’s a project that lasts the entirety of a school year/semester and is (somewhat) self-directed. Students choose an inquiry question (and some teachers are stricter on the definition of an “inquiry question” than others) and spend the time allotted to answering the question. It’s ‘supposed’ to take 20% of class time, but I’d say what I did was more of a 10%.

I have students brain storm some things they would do if they had the time

Since my goal is language use, I’m pretty open to ANYTHING students want to do. The way I present it is: what is something you would want to spend your time on if you were given extra time in your day? So, I’ve had students teach themselves coding, learn ASL, design jewelry, make a comic book, and research the best type of pet habitat for a hamster and build one for their new pet!

Student planning her dorm for college

There’s always a research component to the project (or a science-fair aspect). So, one example of a project was a student wanted her family to eat together more often. Her goal was to cook a meal for the family to share once a month. First, she surveyed them on their likes and dislikes. Then, after each meal she elicited feedback (quality of the meal, improvement for next time). She also had “personal testimonials” from her parents and brother about the experience of doing these family meals together, took pictures, put them on a poster board, and then presented about her experience. Another student wanted to have the best dorm for when she went to college the next year. So she found pictures of the dorm she was going to, created all these vision boards of design features, got a budget, priced out what she was planning on buying, and presented on what her dorm would look like. Another student loved magic-realism books so she wrote a magic-realism short story! First, she researched what features made the genre, read books she liked (for me, I didn’t care what language she read it) and then wrote a story! I gave her an option: write the story itself in French OR write the story in English but reflect on the story-making process in French. Because she was a super-star, she did both!

Bakes sales for the children’s hospital

Some projects, because of their free-form nature, can be incredibly personal. One student wrote in a gratitude journal every day (in French) which she later shared. Another student wanted to start a school club for female gamers because she felt excluded from the current (all-male) school club. Her project was about reflecting on that journey (in French) though the club was an English-language club.  Another student was currently in a (at that point, year-long) fight with our school board about an anti-bullying policy for LGBTQ+ students (he wanted one), and I gave him the option of reflecting on that process as his genius hour project. A group of two students (I eventually opened up the project for pairs to do bigger things together) used their two original ideas (becoming better at baking, volunteering at the children’s hospital) to fundraise for the hospital through bake sales.

Some projects don’t go so well. Students who imagined writing, producing and filming a short film end up just submitting a script that was never filmed. I’ve seen a half-finished tesla-coil and five-seconds of a stop-motion animation film that was supposed to be a minute (it made me think of this clip from Parks and Rec!). I’m very much a “it’s about the journey, not the destination” person, so I truly don’t care that your tesla coil failed, just that you wrote about the experience and are willing to talk about it with me and your peers in the target language.

Some more examples: